Iritor Online Development Report #3

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Wootsoft President Markus Fuhrmann talks about the online world's recent update to the latest graphics technology.

By IGN Staff

While theories may abound about the origins of the universe, there is no doubt how the planet Iritor came to be. The setting for Wootsoft's Iritor Online is a toroidal body built by a highly advanced race called the Creators in order to serve as a scientific laboratory of unprecedented magnitude. Despite their amazing level of technology, they are not omnipotent or even unchallenged, and according to an ancient prophecy, they can only save their universe with the help of a lesser race. Accordingly, they have gathered together specimens of all the species they could find and brought them to Iritor, knowing it is far too small for any realistic chance of peaceful co-existence, especially since quite a few are antagonistic by nature. The result is highly predictable; violent conflict is a constant fact of life.

Humanity almost succeeded in eliminating itself in a global war, but the Creators located a colony ship that is searching space for a new home. The settlers on board are thrust into a place filled with savage species that seek only to eradicate them. However, although deaths occur regularly, an energy to matter conversion device known as The Grid spans the entire world, and a Regulator reverses any lethal outcomes. As a consequence, fatality is only temporary; those that are killed merely awaken elsewhere a short time later. We located Iritor Online some time ago and have been tracking its progress with interest ever since. Recently, we were able to arrange to enhance our coverage with a series of insider perspectives. In this third Development Report, company President Markus Fuhrmann talks about the team's decision to upgrade its graphics engine to take advantage of the very latest technologies.

This report covers our switch in graphics technology that started about five months ago. While our old engine, which was also used to produce the highly praised E3 demo, was not outdated, it didn't satisfy our thirst for cutting edge technology. The incorporated technologies (namely bump mapping, specular mapping on a per pixel level, and full scene shadows) are far from being standard in today's games and maybe not even in tomorrow's, but with the average lifespan of an MMORPG in mind, we wanted to be flexible beyond a few gimmicks that are cool today but will lose their coolness in a year or less. This is a typical screenshot from our E3 demo that you might have already seen.

On the horizon, we saw DirectX 9.0, and with it, the advance of a fully programmable architecture with a huge potential. Although we used pixel and vertex shaders before, we didn't really plan ahead to harvest the possibilities and freedom of upcoming hardware. After E3, the ATI Radeon 9700 was just announced, but not really available, and DirectX 9.0 was not even beta, but we already thought about ways to improve the look of our game, Iritor Online.

The first important step was to overthrow the old bump mapping technique in favor of the far more advanced normal mapping. Bump mapping can lend a sense of depth to flat surfaces, but it can never truly substitute geometry. Normal mapping on the other hand, can make edges look really round. It can be used to model the detail of a human body starting with detailed muscles and facial features to things as small as veins. The most astonishing thing to me still is the ability to display detailed structure on a flat surface. This step not only increased our graphics quality immensely, it also reduced our vertex count for pretty much everything. The process requires the source art to be of much higher quality than anything ever used in a real time 3D engine to date - the models are much closer to the those used in rendered sequences and movies. A typical in-game model with 3,000 vertices is hardly distinguishable from its high-resolution counterpart that can have up to 300,000.

With the dawn of vertex and pixel shaders 2.0 and the encompassing high-level language, we redesigned our shader system to support the new extensions. This framework was first put to use with the implementation of the full phong lighting system. The added precision created crisper and more realistic speculars that elevate the graphics quality into regions previously occupied by offline renderers. The architecture provides fallback solutions for older hardware that get the most out of your graphics card even if you don't have the latest silicon. Our biggest goal however was met right on the spot, to give those of you that did buy the biggest and baddest board the satisfaction that you did the right thing - the game will not merely have higher framerates, it will have more effects, light sources, and higher image quality. Depending on the speed of hardware development, the boards might actually get fast enough to use soft shadows or 128bit High Dynamic Range Lighting in a game. Whatever the future brings, we are going to be prepared since our flexible architecture allows for continuous updates in visual quality without the need to change the underlying pipeline.

We did not change everything of course; some things were just too good already. The engine still supports seamless transition from inside to outside scenes and visa versa, displays an infinite number of light sources, and does full scene shadowing. But at its core it now represents the new age of real time computer graphics - or like nVidia calls it: "The Dawn of Cinematic Computing." With this new technology, we created a live running demo for them that was presented at the GeForce FX launch during Comdex in Las Vegas. The following screenshots are taken from one of the scenes and allow you to take a glimpse at the beauty of Iritor Online's visuals.